Hi all,
I have encountered a little problem and I am not sure how to resolve it.
When I use a Monitors DAT, two graphic cards appear, one for each screen.
I have my laptop monitor, and an external monitor connected via HDMI.
According to the Monitors DAT, it’s my understanding that my laptop screen is using an Intel HD 630, while my external monitor is using an Nvidia GTX 1060.
(To be honest I even didn’t know I had a Intel HD 360 graphic card on my laptop, I always thought I had the NVIDIA only)
I have a Window COMP extending to both monitors, with my generative visuals on the external monitor (eventually will be a video projector), and the UI with faders and some thumbnails on my laptop screen.
How do I resolve this, any tip to point me in the right direction? My guess is that it would be better if the NVIDIA card would deal with both monitors?
This tries to normally use the simpler Intel GPU (which is onboard of your CPU) to save battery, and only switch to the Nvidia GPU when needed. Depending on your laptop brand/model there can be a switch to set this. For instance my laptop has some vendor software running in the tray where I can switch to Hybrid (Intel) or Discrete (Nvidia), which will then require a reboot.
There’s often also a setting in the BIOS where you can select which one to use.
Further there can be a setting in your Nvidia control panel where you can select for which application to use which GPU.
But TouchDesigner usually will be doing all the processing with the Nvidia on a properly configured Nvidia drivers by default, you can confirm this by watching the task manager GPU graph. However, the Monitors DAT will still report Intel for the built-in display on most of these laptops because their displays are directly wired to the Intel GPU. So, even if the Nvidia GPU does the ‘work’, it then sends the final image through the Intel GPU to get to your built-in display, thus the Monitors DAT will continue to show Intel GPU for that display. But it should not get in your way in reality, it’s just a red herring.
This can also be a problem when screengrabbing monitors fyi.
If for some reason it gets in your way, you can usually go direct from the Nvidia GPU by using the HDMI out or sometimes Thunderbolt3 outputs exclusively, but each laptops internal wiring differs here. You can close the laptop and run it in clamshell mode, send everything out to external monitors for example.
One thing that sometimes does occur on optimus laptops is that when vertical sync is on, opening floating windows on both monitors will case the frame rate to get stuck at 30fps. This is due to the 2 GPUs fighting over sync, and then falling down to the lowest common denominator. If this happens, you can go to Nvidia Control Panel and manually turn off vertical sync and you will have much better frame rate with any number of floating windows open.
Thank you so much for this Ben. This clarify things even more.
I don’t have an optimus laptop, but I was experiencing low fps and your comment helped me troubleshooting. Now everything is running happily.
By “optimus laptop” I mean a laptop with “Nvidia Optimus” technology on it as @nettoyeur mentioned above. When you see 2 GPUs showing up in Monitors DAT and Task Manager like that, you have the Optimus! It can be annoying, but is par for the course in Windows laptops.
